We present a 16 bit microcontroller with hardware support for fuzzy logic. We show that special support both at the instruction level and at the micro-architecture level allows a remarkable speed up for fuzzy logic control algorithms. The fuzzy logic support has been concurrently studied at the hardware and software level to reach a synergy by the codesign approach. Moreover we propose a template for fuzzy control applications specifically studied to reduce the memory accesses during the algorithm execution. All these resorts lead to a speed-up factor of more than two in fuzzy logic computation. The microcontroller has also been designed for executing typical control applications and has been tested on traditional benchmarks. All the design cycle has constantly aimed to optimize the cost performance trade-off to define a cost effective architecture that can be applied in a large spectrum of applications.